


The Second Sun

by RoryKurago



Category: Sinbad (TV)
Genre: Daydreaming, F/M, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-17
Updated: 2015-11-17
Packaged: 2018-05-02 03:14:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5231789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoryKurago/pseuds/RoryKurago
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gunnar thinks of her sometimes. It’s the way her breast swells from all her silks and brocades like the Sól herself rising from the sea, and the secrets she hides in the corner of her eye.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Second Sun

**Author's Note:**

> so it turns out I had quite a crush on Nala a while back  
> Prompt 47: Mystery

He thought of her, sometimes. Even when the sea was becalmed around them and it seemed that death himself stalked the _Providence_ , Gunnar couldn’t help but think of her. They were the darkest and the lightest. Drastically different and yet, he understood more and more every day, alike in the most curious of ways. And even when she was at her most aloof, Gunnar couldn’t help but wonder what Nala would look like with all her majesty stripped away. What, standing before her, he would think to see her laid bare and human.

_Sweat trickled between Nala’s shoulder blades. The Varangian could see it from where he sat fashioning a fishhook. He longed to follow those drops, trace their journey into territories unknown. With all the misfortune that dogged their steps, it seemed as if Loki himself danced on the prow of their ship. These thoughts – any thoughts – were a welcome distraction from that grim notion._

He had known women before. With no wife to give him pause and his loyalties bound only to his steel, why should he not have taken the cup of life and drunk deep of its sweetness?

But in Nala he sensed a darkness - a secret to match his own - and in sensing it, thirsted to taste its flavour for himself.

And so he wondered. Watching, learning. Always from the corner of his eye. Never openly enough for one of the others to catch on. He had no worry of Nala herself. Fiercely intelligent as she was, she was also innocent in a way he hadn’t come across in a long time. He saw the mingling of fear and lust in that hooded gaze whenever Sinbad or himself chanced to walk by her half-clothed. It wasn’t hard to divine the origins of that look. In the depths of night, when the ship was asleep, Gunnar lay awake in his bunk and basked in the warmth that coiled at the base of his spine like the snakes carried provocatively by the dancing girls of Alexandria.

Free of watchful eyes, he wondered at the line of Nala’s throat. Her proud, sensual profile. The dips of her navel and hipbones. That heavy-lidded gaze—part predator, part silent observer.

He pondered how her lips curved out and twisted up into a smile, and the brilliant flash of white against her skin when they did so. He envisioned her strong legs peeking through the slits in those fitted skirts and imagined how they would feel squeezing his waist, the soft skin of her inner thighs stroking his hips. Some days, like today, he pictured unlacing her stomach-baring tops, one eyelet at a time – or violently, at once – and trailing his mouth down her spine to the dips of her lower back.

More than once, shivers had crawled down his spine like a bad omen when Nala made a sound or interjection that was all too easy to ascribe different origins to. This one: a whimper of delight or surprise. That: a guttural moan that made his ears itch to hear it in earnest.

As if in sympathy, imaginary lines on his back ached to be marked out. To pass the time he waxed lyrical to himself on the virtues of being buried deep inside her while they fucked, feeling her tense around him until her moans made the air quake. What would they look like together? He, the blue-eyed Northman, and Nala, black-eyed Queen of South who wore her silks as armour and let no man close enough to say if she had a heart or not?

He wanted to watch her come apart. And more than that: he wanted to see what lay beneath. There was a secret there; he saw a corner of it peeking up from the loam, sometimes. A brassy glint like a lover’s whisper: tawdry but precious. The animal side of him wanted to know what it was, purely for the joy of discovery. But this trail of thought took time to sink into, and it was only after everything else was peeled away that he found himself pondering that particular aspect of Nala.

But it was the smooth curve of her breast that caught his eye every day. That threatened to give him away.

It was the way her bust swelled from all her silks and brocades like the Sól herself rising from the sea. Whenever this thought occurred to him, he longed to travel below the horizon and find out where the sun went to sleep at the end of the day—and where it rose from, the next. He would gamble a hundred fortunes that his fingertips on that curve would find it smooth as her silks, and that it would taste of musk, and spice, and far-off places he had never been to.

Thoughts of this kind left him panting and hard, straining to hear if he had woken anyone even as the taste of cinnamon and cloves faded from his mouth. The snake uncoiled itself and left for another night and the next morning he would be up at dawn to salute the birth of a new sun as if nothing happened.

And until the second sun rose – sometimes awash in green, sometimes red, or orange, or blue – all was right with the world.

This was his period of respite. It would last until dawn fully broke over the _Providence,_ waking the last of her crew and hurling Gunnar back into his wondering over all the nooks and secret places Nala hid beneath her silken shell.

 


End file.
